You'll notice I said that the Catholic Council of Bishops opinion does not seem to conform to the Vatican's opinion.
But I wasn't so rude as to post the entire official position of the Bishops; it's so long you'd all be screaming at me.
But their Catholic Bishop's position is posted again below. And it's interesting that there is obviously even deep divisions within the Catholic Church about this matter.
For instance, one of the reasons it is permissable to starve a person is if the financial burden becomes to great.
http://www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/euthanas/nutqa.htm
Yes, we all know that the Vatican doesn't have a clue about Catholic doctrine.
Before 1972, when influential neurologists Drs. Fred Plum and Bryan Jennett coined the term "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) to describe a condition in which a person was presumed awake but unaware because of an injury or illness involving the brain, the idea of removing a feeding tube from a brain-injured person was simply unthinkable. The experience of the Nazi euthanasia program -- which used medical personnel to end the lives of the disabled, mentally ill and others characterized as "useless eaters" -- was considered the ultimate betrayal of medical ethics and still fresh in many minds.
But around this same time, the euthanasia movement was finally gaining traction with its "living will" document, where a person could request no heroic measures when he or she was dying. Because traditional ethics held that medical treatment could be withheld or withdrawn if it was futile or excessively burdensome, there were few objections to such a document and state legislatures started passing laws giving legal status to such documents.
However, it wasn't long before "right to die" court cases involving people considered in PVS started to result in feeding tubes being withdrawn with the support and court testimony of some doctors and ethicists who maintained that PVS patients would never recover and that such patients would refuse medically assisted food and water. As a result, PVS began to be added to state "living will" laws and eventually such laws expanded to include documents allowing the withdrawal of virtually any kind of medical treatment or care by a designated surrogate when a patient was mentally unable to make decisions.
Some influential Catholic ethicists developed theological justifications for withdrawing food and water in the special case of PVS by arguing that there was no moral obligation to maintain the lives of such people who could supposedly no longer achieve the spiritual and cognitive purpose of life. Terms like "futile" and "burdensome" -- the traditional ethical standard for withdrawing treatment or care -- were redefined . "Futility" was now to mean little or no chance of mental not physical improvement, and "burdensome" to the patient, was extended to include family distress, medical costs and even social fairness in distributing "scarce health care resources".
Despite myriad Church statements supporting the basic right to food and water (see sidebar page 34), some of these Catholic ethicists even testified in "right to die" court cases that their view was consistent with Church teaching, insisting that there was no intention to cause death by starvation and dehydration but rather merely withdrawing unwanted and useless treatment.
Unfortunately, some Catholic ethicists have moved even beyond PVS, and now include conditions such as Alzheimer's and the newly named "minimally conscious state" (in which patients are mentally impaired but not unconscious) as additional circumstances in which giving a person medically assisted food and water, antibiotics, etc., is no longer obligatory.
http://www.ncbcenter.org/eol-guide-8.html
Euthanasia has been defined by Pope John Paul II, in The Gospel of Life, as "an action or omission which of itself and by intention causes death, with the purpose of eliminating all suffering." Supporters of euthanasia often justify it or physician-assisted suicide on the grounds that the pain of terminal illness is too great for the average person to bear. They hold that it is more merciful to kill the suffering patient. The Pope, as representative of Christ on earth, holds that "euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person." It is a fundamentally unreasonable act.
Life-sustaining treatments and vegetative state: Scientific advances and ethical dilemmas. Address of John Paul II to the participants in the International Congress
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/doc/doc_33vegetativestate.html